Wireless Watch

Intel and Xilinx hint at how FPGAs can enable the future carrier network

When Intel acquired Altera, one of the two leading providers of programmable FPGA chips, it signalled the new prominence of this technology to support heavy duty processing tasks in the data center, cloud and telco network. But in the carrier world, it has been Altera’s arch-rival Xilinx that has been more agile, working closely with Qualcomm on its server offering, and with Amazon AWS on an FPGA cloud platform which could support telcos in future. The FPGA (field programmable gate array) can be customized to perform specific functions very well. In the mobile world, it is used by Intel, Qualcomm and others to take on specialized or high-performance tasks in many platforms from the 5G modem to the Cloud-RAN server.…